Peter Watts - Blindsight

Somehow, absurdly, that had become the one thing I did care about.

No one in the spine. Only Cunningham visible in BioMed, poring over digital dissections, pretending to kill time. I floated above him, my rebuilt hand clinging to the top of the nearest stairwell; it dragged me in a slow, small circle as the Drum turned. Even from up there I could see the tension in the set of his shoulders: a system stuck in a holding pattern, corroding through the long hours as fate advanced with all the time in the world.

He looked up. “Ah. It lives.”

I fought the urge to retreat. Just a conversation, for God’s sake. It’s just two people talking. People do it all the time without your tools. You can do this. You can do this.

Just try .

So I forced one foot after another down the stairs, weight and apprehension rising in lockstep. I tried to read Cunningham’s topology through the haze. Maybe I saw a facade, only microns deep. Maybe he would welcome almost any distraction, even if he wouldn’t admit it.

Or maybe I was just imagining it.

“How are you doing?” he asked as I reached the deck.

I shrugged.

“Hand all better, I see.”

“No thanks to you.”

I’d tried to stop that from coming out. Really.

Cunningham struck a cigarette. “Actually, I was the one who fixed you up.”

“You also sat there and watched while he took me apart.”

“I wasn’t even there.” And then, after a moment: “But you may be right. I might very well have sat it out in any event. Amanda and the Gang did try to intervene on your behalf, from what I hear. Didn’t do a lot of good for anyone.”

“So you wouldn’t even try.”

“Would you, if the sitution were reversed? Go up unarmed against a vampire?”

I said nothing. Cunningham regarded me for a long moment, dragging on his cigarette. “He really got to you, didn’t he?” he said at last.

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“Am I.”

“I don’t play people .”

“Mmmm.” He seemed to consider the proposition. “What word would you prefer, then?”

“I observe .”

“That you do. Some might even call it surveillance .”

“I — I read body language.” Hoping that that was all he was talking about.

“It’s a matter of degree and you know it. Even in a crowd there’s a certain expectation of privacy. People aren’t prepared to have their minds read off every twitch of the eyeball.” He stabbed at the air with his cigarette. “And you. You’re a shapeshifter. You present a different face to every one of us, and I’ll wager none of them is real. The real you, if it even exists, is invisible…”

Something knotted below my diaphragm. “Who isn’t? Who doesn’t — try to fit in, who doesn’t want to get along? There’s nothing malicious about that. I’m a synthesist, for God’s sake! I never manipulate the variables.”

“Well you see, that’s the problem. It’s not just variables you’re manipulating.”

Smoke writhed between us.

“But I guess you can’t really understand that, can you.” He stood and waved a hand. ConSensus windows imploded at his side. “Not your fault, really. You can’t blame someone for the way they’re wired.”

“Give me a fucking break,” I snarled.

His dead face showed nothing.

That, too, had slipped out before I could stop it — and after that came the flood: “You put so much fucking stock in that. You and your empathy . And maybe I am just some kind of imposter but most people would swear I’d worn their very souls. I don’t need that shit, you don’t have to feel motives to deduce them, it’s better if you can’t , it keeps you—”

“Dispassionate?” Cunningham smiled faintly.

“Maybe your empathy ’s just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you’re only feeling yourself , maybe you’re even worse than me. Or maybe we’re all just guessing. Maybe the only difference is that I don’t lie to myself about it.”

“Do they look the way you imagined?” he asked.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The scramblers. Multijointed arms from a central mass . Sounds rather similar to me.”

He’d been into Szpindel’s archives.

“I — Not really,” I said. “The arms are more — flexible, in real life. More segmented. And I never really got a look at the body. What does that have to do with—”

“Close, though, wasn’t it? Same size, same general body plan.”

“So what ?”

“Why didn’t you report it?”

“I did. Isaac said it was just TMS. From Rorschach .”

“You saw them before Rorschach . Or at least,” he continued, “you saw something that scared you into blowing your cover, back when you were spying on Isaac and Michelle.”

My rage dissipated like air through a breach. “They — they knew?”

“Only Isaac, I think. And it kept it between it and the logs. I suspect it didn’t want to interfere with your noninterference protocols — although I’ll wager that was the last time you ever caught the two of them in private, yes?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Did you think the official observer was somehow exempt from observation?” Cunningham asked after a while.

“No,” I said softly. “I suppose not.”

He nodded. “Have you seen any since? I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill TMS hallucinations. I mean scramblers. Have you hallucinated any since you actually saw one in the flesh, since you knew what they looked like?”

I thought about it. “No.”

He shook his head, some new opinion confirmed. “You really are something, Keeton, you know that? You don’t lie to yourself? Even now, you don’t know what you know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You figured it out . From Rorschach ’s architecture, probably — form follows function, yes? Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least—” He drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED — “part of you did. Some collection of unconscious modules working their asses off on your behalf. But they can’t show their work, can they? You don’t have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table.”

“Blindsight,” I murmered. You just get a feeling of where to reach…

“More like schizophrenia, except you saw pictures instead of hearing voices. You saw pictures . And you still didn’t understand.”

I blinked. “But how would I — I mean—”

“What did you think, that Theseus was haunted? That the scramblers were communing with you telepathically? What you do — it matters , Keeton. They told you you were nothing but their stenographer and they hammered all those layers of hands-off passivity into you but you just had to take some initiative anyway, didn’t you? Had to work the problem on your own. The only thing you couldn’t do was admit it to yourself.” Cunningham shook his head. “Siri Keeton. See what they’ve done to you.”

He touched his face.

“See what they’ve done to us all,” he whispered.

I found the Gang floating in the center of the darkened observation blister. She made room as I joined her, pushed to one side and anchored herself to a bit of webbing.